When the corn was dry, the Indians pounded it in order to make meal or hominy of it.  Sometimes they parched the corn, and then pounded it into meal.  They carried this parched meal with them when they went hunting and when they went to war.  They could eat it with a little water, without stopping to cook it.  They called it Nokick, but the white people called it No-cake.

When the Pilgrims came to Cape Cod, they sent out Miles Standish and some other men to look through the country and find a good place for them to settle.  Standish tried to find some of the Indians in order to make friends with them, but the Indians ran away whenever they saw him coming.  One day he found a heap of sand.  He knew it had been lately piled up, because he could see the marks of hands on the sand where the Indians had patted it down.  Standish and his men dug up this heap.  They soon came to a little old basket full of Indian corn.  When they had dug further, they found a very large new basket full of fine corn which had been lately gathered.

The white men, who had never seen it before, thought Indian corn very beautiful.  Some of the ears were yellow, some were red.  On other ears blue and yellow grains were mixed.  Standish and his men said it was a “very goodly sight.”  The Indian basket was round and narrow at the top.  It held three or four bushels of corn, and it was as much as two men could do to lift it from the ground.  The white men wondered to see how handsomely it was woven.

[Illustration:  Standish and his Men find Corn.]

Near the pile of corn they found an old kettle which the Indians had probably bought from some ship.  They filled this kettle with corn, They also filled their baskets with it.  They wanted the corn for seed.  They made up their mind to pay the Indians whenever they could find them.  The next summer they found out who were the owners of this buried corn, and paid them for all the corn they had taken.  If they had not found this corn, they would not have had any to plant the next spring, and so they would have starved to death.

The people that were with Miles Standish settled at Plymouth.  They were the first that came to live in New England.  An Indian named Squanto came to live with the white people at Plymouth.  Squanto was born at this very place.  He had been carried away to England by a sea captain.  Then he had been brought back by another captain to his own country.  When he got back to Plymouth, he found that all the people of his village had died from a great sickness.  He went to live with another tribe near by.  When the white people came to Plymouth, they settled on the ground where Squanto’s people had lived.  As he could speak some English, and as all his own tribe were dead, he now came to live with the white people.